Not being an asshole will make you more money
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I was dealing with the same purchasing lawyer on both contracts. The process was super-standard: someone sends a first draft, the other side redlines (proposes changes and makes comments), then the first team redline, etc, at some point you all compromise a bit and someone makes a clean copy of the document containing all the agreed changes for everyone to sign. So we got to the point we had all agreed and the purchasing lawyer on the other side produced the "clean copy" but he obviously thought we were a bunch of rubes so he produced a clean copy for us to sign by backing out all of our changes and only putting in his changes. This is a ridiculously low-integrity bush-league stunt and he did it on the zero-cost POC contract while we were still negotiating the >1m big contract.
Some people just want to win so bad it doesn't even matter to them that they are being total assholes, the prize is zero and it's outright harmful to their own interests. I bet he cheats when playing his own kids at boardgames.
Sleezy as this is you wouldn't be able to show damages since you didn't sign the contract. The other lawyer can claim error and the burden of proof would be on you.
If you did accept, then you have a lengthy court battle ahead where a jury could very well rule "abide by the contract you signed you reneging moocher."
The real world isn't a school playground. Calling a teacher over is time consuming and expensive and far from a guarantee of justice. It is up to you to keep yourself safe from assholes like this by always doing your due diligence. Someone who pulls this kind of shit constantly will eventually lose their license, but many years down the road and after many victims.
[https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...]
If it really was intentional, this very clearly meets the standard, and there's absolutely no requirement that there be damages for the lawyer to be disciplined. I'm not talking about a fraud or malpractice claim, so there's no reason this would involve a lengthy court battle, etc.
Further, Rule 8.3: "(a) A lawyer who knows that another lawyer has committed a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer's honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects, shall inform the appropriate professional authority."
[https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...]
Seems to fit as well if the behavior was repeated.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
> The ABA is not a lawyer disciplinary agency and has no authority to investigate or act upon complaints filed against lawyers. Each state has its own agency that performs that function in regard to lawyers practicing in that state. Locate your state agency from the Directory of State Disciplinary Agencies.
So you're not dealing with the ABA, but the underfunded and understaffed state board.
California's state bar even has a formal opinion calling out this or similar behavior:
"Had Seller’s Attorney intentionally created a defective “redline” to surreptitiously conceal the change to the covenant not to compete, his conduct would constitute deceit, active concealment and possibly fraud, in violation of Seller’s Attorney’s ethical obligations."
[https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/ethics/Opinion...]
It always significantly deteriorated relations with that company. But I guess Americans think that's fine because "it's just business".
That's a really prejudiced and unwarranted view of Americans. If anything it says more about your biases and prejudices than it does about one nation.
I am an American citizen so you can take it from an American citizen instead. Companies have zero scruples whatsoever about screwing over others in business.
After seeing it first-hand, I'm noticing this attitude even in fields like global politics, where burning goodwill to gain very minor advantages seems to be the policy these days.
But that's the thing... do you have access to a representative, uniform, random sample of US customers? Do you have a similar sample of customers from other regions to compare against? Are those samples based on your actual data rather than personal anecdotes? Have you eliminated hidden variables that could better explain this behavior than simply the place they are from?
If you answered "no" to any of the above, you're suffering from availability bias.
> After seeing it first-hand, I'm noticing this attitude even in fields like global politics, where burning goodwill to gain very minor advantages seems to be the policy these days.
And that one is called confirmation bias.
FWIW My wife and I were negotiating a commercial lease and we always did a diff between what they send back and what we sent them in case they pulled something like that. It may not be malicious (i.e. they updated a wrong version). They had integrity and they didn't do pull any stunts.
In spite of everything everyone on this thread thinks/says, it definitely wasn't an error. I spoke to another third-party vendor (over a beer) who were going through purchasing at the same time as us and he was doing the exact same thing with them.
It's something I probably wouldn't do because the risk is too high, but I wouldn't be quick to assume the contract manager decides on his behavior based on feelings towards new companies.
Even if he is working for the most benevolent & generous of corporations right now, the temptation to switch to a firm or org with a significant to dominant ruthlessness component will always be there.
He was just keeping up his chops.
After I left I had a friend ask about the company, because they were about to a deal with them. I gave my honest opinion and suggested they be sure to get any money up front and be very careful to reduce their risk.
Does it? It seems to have worked for the president of the USA just fine and that was his exact tactic in all of his business "deals".
There are many points for a small business to tap into one or more of their streams in a way which everybody wins. But this usually requires that no disruption takes place. Without actually adding value (to natural resources) yourself, you are allowed to remove enough value to grow an operation having share price which can outperform the underlying monopoly.
This is a common strategy with oil & chemical companies.
They can also afford to not be a pain or make you wait until the end to be financially worth it.
The first group finds they eventually have to move to get back to progressing in their career (hopefully learning from their mistake). I've known guys who moved and did change, running into them again and finding them to be completely different people, settled into family life, and quite happy. I've known guys who moved and didn't change, found themselves needing to move again in 10 years, all while cursing the world for being against them.
The second group just never progresses in their careers. You see them try to move into positions that seemingly fit such behavior, like "serial entrepreneur" or "SEO consultant". They never really grow, always behaving like they're still in their early 20s. By the time they hit their 40s, they can't pick up chicks at bars anymore and it hits home that they've wasted their life. Unfortunately, I've never met anyone who changed and turned it around.
It does come around. It just takes longer than internet scale time.
No alternative is rare, so the ratio is the interesting measure. (And no, I don't know this one.)
How sure of that are you? One of the big proponents of this strategy is currently President of the United States.
IME it works only if the party is the only way in town and negotiation is only on scope and price (i.e., the other party cannot take their business elsewhere). Otherwise they get known as "assholes not to deal with" which is a very hard thing to shake off. My 2c.
For lawyers, at least, this might work...once. The second time they try it, you know there'll be no "give" in "give-and-take", so you're not afraid of going in for trench warfare. If they're assholes through-and-through, it's not unheard of for party B to ask party A to switch lawyers.
It's an excessively short-term view of "winning", and it doesn't benefit anybody in the long run.
Source: former corporate lawyer.
That so feels like a mistake because that's the sort of tactic that would completely and utterly remove their capability of ever working as a corporate lawyer ever again for any company.
If that genuinely happened, that lawyer needs to be disbarred, but that's a pretty damn egregious accusation.
He's an attorney. Contract version control is part of his job. Selectively discarding counterparty edits is blatant.
I'm betting that, if the lawyer was not acting maliciously, s/he used the wrong version of the document to accept changes.
There are some cases in which granting the benefit of the doubt is too much of a risk to be worth taking.
I was just saying that I tend to err on the side of stupidity. Most people are stupid. Very few are bad actors in their day-to-day lives.
With a sufficiently big organization, it's common for some sort of higher precedence, non-negotiable appendix to render most of this stuff moot anyway. Corporate attorneys on the sell-side, even at surprisingly big companies frequently screw this up, often when making snide comments through the salespeople.
My buddy tells a story from when he was an SE many years ago and his company's attorneys were going to kill a deal over an NDA requirement. The customer ended up getting them to agree to "blah blah blah, subject to applicable law". One problem: the customer was a city, subject to freedom of information law in that state!
Experienced salespeople usually get it but eye-roll, as they have an incentive to STFU.
The attorney is the expert. I am not. If the attorney makes a mistake, I have no tools with which to judge whether it was stupidity or malice. I have to assume that it's both. My own attorney may better be able to make that assessment, and I'll respect their judgment. But until then, an opposing attorney has to be assumed to have all of the power and every reason to use it.
No, that's basically SOP for big corporate lawyers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
I'm often curious about the relationship between this concept to solipsism.
Easy to test.
1. Send back the document he sent with a copy of your most recent edits and ask him to confirm if his document is correct.
2. But, make note of at ONE error, and see if he fixes all of them.
3. If he only fixes only the one, then he's either really lazy or trying to keep up the deceit.
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3, be sure to CC everyone involved. If he's lazy he will be ashamed and be more careful. If he's a sneaky bastard he will most likely get angry.
Not foolproof, but will sure make everyone aware of what is going on. (regardless of the motives)
Standing your ground while maintaining a logical and rational approach is the only way to deal with them.
Most of them like a fight, so you simply can't pick one with them.
I remember one time where I was discussing a problem with a manager in another team. Every single email he sent, he CC'd the management 2 levels up. Every single email I sent, I sent directly to him only. My colleague was panicking. He felt that I needed to show my side of the story to upper management or else I would be in trouble.
Eventually the management 2 levels up got frustrated: "Why am I getting all of these emails? Why can't you people sort out this problem yourself?" To which I reasonably replied, "I'm very sorry that you've been bothered, and I'm not sure why this person is being so difficult. Now that you are here, would you mind giving us a hand?" Problem solved.
Thanks for pointing this out.
They are likely to repeat the attempt if they think they can get away with it on you.
1) It was a mistake and it doesn't go to court.
2) It was intentional and it doesn't go to court because the attorney, while still being a piece of shit, understands what option 3 is.
3) It was intentional, it goes to court, and you produce the email evidence showing the attorney agreed to changeset N then sent along changeset N-1, and the provisions are thrown out because they were executed in bad faith.
But how does a modern, complex and non-homogeneous society aribiter cases without turning "poisonous" or odious to some members?
To my knowledge much of Europe, M.E., Asia and even S. America are composed of largely homogeneous populaces with a smattering of outsiders at best.
There is no perfect society in this regard. Just because it's hard doesn't mean that such societies shouldn't strive to reduce the odiousness, and maximize the fairness in the administration of justice, regardless of the subgroup that the contending parties may belong to. Fair and equal treatment under the eyes of the law is a cornerstone of human rights.
> To my knowledge much of Europe, M.E., Asia and even S. America are composed of largely homogeneous populaces with a smattering of outsiders at best.
You've listed regions that contain some of the most heterogenous countries on earth in ethnicity, language, and culture, like the UK, France, China, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Indonesia, Brazil.
Some of these countries have multiple, sometimes contradictory legal systems, some sanctioned by the state, others by religious power structures.
The country that is often referred to as among the most homogeneous societies in the world, Japan, has a pretty well acknowledged dual justice system for citizens versus visitors. All societies fail at this, but if anything, the very homogeneous societies fail the most at offering equal justice.
Countries with a steady inflow of new migrants of all networths.
Countries that make real attempts to be fair to native born people and outsiders alike.
A country could speak 2 or 3 different languages and still a very largely monocultural way of doing things. Not to cherry pick but do you really think the Yighurs in China get a fair shake in a court? I really want to hear if you've read differently.
A country could have on paper very impressive law frameworks and yet in action be essentially meaningless since most of the population doesnt have access to fair representation.
Not mere grandiose legal frameworks with not an ounce of real world enforcement to back it up or go after bad actors in a legitimate way, without extra legal acts of justice or worse mob justice.
Pretty much any and every country you mentioned fails to meet atleast one or - in most cases - all of the criteria.
Definitely not. Multiethnicity is necessary, but insufficient condition
> Pretty much any and every country you mentioned fails to meet atleast one or - in most cases - all of the criteria.
That's obvious. I didn't say they were perfect, just far from homogeneous. And there's not much to learn from very homogeneous societies in this regard.
The question for the complex heterogeneous societies isn't whether they fail, but rather what direction they are moving in. Arguably both China and the US have moved backwards of late.
I'm sure I can point at legal systems across the globe that have examples of completely terrible injustice.
Which legal system are you referring to that is significantly not "poisonous"? And why?
Most legal systems are broken in some way to some extent. Unfair cases exist because people aren't perfect, make mistakes and/or have agendas.
I'm saying they are not actively poisonous, such as in US. I think it's related to how weaponized the legal system in US is compared anywhere else
Not the law, not what is right or who has been virtuous. Just money. Or more specifically: who has the money.
If you are poor and you sue someone who is rich, they control that outcome. If you are rich and you sue someone who is poor, they (by default) control that outcome; there's nothing there. If you are both poor, a judge will often decide based who looks and sounds the less poor. If you are both rich, then (the equivalent of) actuaries decide the outcome.
Criminal lawsuits are similar. I do not care how much you fuck up in this country; The amount of time you spend in jail will be inversely proportional to the amount of money you can spend to fight it.
Yes, not all of us are in the SF Bay Area, but it's pretty reasonable to assume that most readers are.
As for your downvoters: plenty of people believe they should downvote when they simply disagree. Others believe that downvoting without a comment is fine. These two groups make HN less interesting.
I actually want to know the reason why. Too many people hide behind a downvote and contribute nothing. Meanwhile they are making interesting posts disappear for no good reason. And other comments that are blatantly rubbish are not touched at all.
Totally agree with you ! But maybe some people misunderstood what you wrote.
I'd rather say that the crowd here is technically fit and policed enough to try to understand elaborate and forward-looking viewpoints, sometimes contrary to the doxa [0]. That makes comment so enjoyable to read. And it's also reassuring, that we can agree on some things on both sides of the planet .
edit : and some people who like to think of themselves as independent thinkers and live in SF by design or accident, will not like to see their opinions qualified as "SF" opinions. Works equally well for any part of the world.
> As for your downvoters
+1. This mechanism is a rather raw moderation system, people will abuse it to disqualify competing stances. There are options to refine it.
Not sure "relocate" is the best word. I've been freelancer for 8 years and one of my client is a YC startup that is and has always been in Paris, France.
See https://www.ycombinator.com/atyc/ "We ask the founders of each startup we fund to move to the Bay Area for the duration of their cycle" and https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#p3 "Of course, after the 3 month program, you can go wherever you want."
It's only the Americans that think they're the center of the world.
I used to watch this Japanese show "Why did you come to Japan?" where a camera crew hangs out at Narita Airport and ambushes unsuspecting foreigners with that question and try to tag along on the journey of people they think are there for an interesting reason. When everyone introduces themselves they say the country they are from, except Americans who always say which state they are from and never the country. I found that particularly interesting. So, I just assume it's a deeply ingrained cultural thing to treat "America as default".
If it helps, think of every US state as if it was a european country. You might lazily think they are all the same but scratch the surface and there's a lot of difference.
So yeah, its fine for someone to say they're from California. You already know they're from the land of High Fructose Corn Syrup so why be nasty about it?
Compare it to Europe, where a 3 hour drive gives you different food, language, holidays, religion, festivals, type of beer, different political system, different history going back 1000+ years... and another 3 hour drive does it all over again.
I live in East Asia, which is by no measure a cultural or technological backwater, and was surprised to hear my mother say, two days ago, "you must get YouTube over there...".
For some more perspective, I'm the most successful member of my family (from a financial pov) and from the condo I live in to the car I drive, I have nicer things than my parents ever did. I'm the first in the family -- and this is something I only considered just now -- to sends his kids to a good / expensive private school.
Though I don't lord it over them, my life is way more advanced / cushy than theirs. But from their point of view I'm not in the US and therefore don't have access to what they consider the gold standard of civilization.
And this point of view has not changed even though my parents have experienced my life in Asia first hand. Truly bizarre blind spot.
These days most people just ask if I've eaten a dog.
Everything you said makes sense if it goes unnoticed until after signing, but I'm less sure about that scenario. Probably varies by jurisdiction, at least when both parties are well-resourced and sophisticated.
Rare, but I've seen it happen.
FWIW I completely agree with both you and OP - it's a totally boneheaded move, but you should never underestimate how boneheaded some people (lawyers in particular) can be.
He didn't pay and promised to sue. His wife was then told that if he sues the kid is out the door. She paid. She never told him. He still thinks "he won". I know many people of all professions can be dicks, but it feels like Lawyers have a greater concentration.
Don’t think about in terms of money, but protection of his fragile ego. In this case, he was enabled by his wife.
I can imagine similar things could have happened in his childhood, people raking for him behind the scenes. (Incredibly entitled behaviour, “rules don’t apply to me”)
The cable company’s attorneys changed several provisions that did not show up as redline changes, while intentionally making syntax and grammar errors that did show up as redline changes.
The investor that didn't want to extend the note was also the CEO of the company that was our largest client, so not only did he call his note, he also ended his company's contract, making a huge hole in our revenue.
After doing that, and knowing that the company would be struggling financially, he sued, forcing the company into bankruptcy.
From the beginning we tried negotiating a payment plan or some other form of compensation, to no avail. Although at some point he did "offer" to completely take over the company and fire the founders (which we of course refused).
During bankruptcy, he took over the assets of the company while also giving us and the trustee a hard time.
Now, after having ruined the jobs of everyone that worked at our company plus the potential upside of all the other investors and shareholders, he is suing me and my cofounder personally.
The company closed 2 years ago and it looks like this new lawsuit will take another 2 years. Also no one knows if this guy is going to stop at that.
Be very careful about doing business with assholes, especially if they have a lot of money and you will be taking any type of potential liability (e.g. debt) in their favor, even if it's not personal liability, they might still try to go after you and make your life miserable.
I can say that he's not based in the Bay Area, so if you are raising money there it is very unlikely you will run into him.
I can also say that our best investors were RightSide Capital, based out of SF. They supported us throughout the whole ordeal with the company and even offered to buy out the other guy. They also said that, out of 600+ investments they had done at the time, they had never seen another investor act the way ours did.
Why didn't this happen? That seems like an obvious outcome of the situation, unless losing the big client is enough to effectively destroy the company.
Instead, he chose to start a (very costly) legal fight.
So far he's probably out $100k+ in legal fees and looking to spend $100-200k more in the new personal lawsuit. The original note was for $250k. I don't think he's ever going to recover the full amount of money he's put into this (not to mention also his and everybody else's time as well as opportunity costs).
That the contract was cancelled because the product wasn't worth it?
That the note wasn't extended because he thought the company was a money sink which would not be profitable? That he thought trying to liquidate the good bits was a better way to get his money, rather than a payment plan from a value destroying enterprise?
That he sued personally because he felt they might be trying to hide assets of the firm?
I could be wrong, but there are other angles to see the picture from.
Replied to another comment of yours with more detail on why it looks like a weird situation.
To add a bit more: our investors, the lawyers that we've worked with so far and even the bankruptcy trustee's team, have all been surprised by the way this guy has been handling the situation and seem to agree that it doesn't make sense to proceed that way in terms of getting a return on his money.
You would be stunned at how often the reasons for events like this are driven by simple narcissism and spite. That's not cynicism speaking, it's reality, and something well worth keeping in mind in any business endeavor.
We've consulted with multiple lawyers and therapists to try to fully understand the situation.
Two guesses so far:
1) When he "offered" to take over the company, he said he would fire me and keep my cofounder running sales. This whole ordeal also coincidentally started a couple of days after my cofounder said she would be stepping down as CEO (even though he had previously told her he would extend the note). We have the impression he wants to "own" my cofounder somehow (according to an expert in psychopaths that we consulted with, the investor fits the profile - my cofounder is also very pretty and she's had to deal with stalkers multiple times in the past)
2) After the conflict started, we found out this investor apparently had defrauded some people to fund his own company (he currently has open lawsuits about that). If this is true, he might be projecting, believing maybe we did the same to him (which we did not)
But those are just guesses. I wish he would just pick up the phone and we could talk to reach some sort of agreement to end this madness.
This sounds like the basis. The saying goes, "Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned," but let's not be sexist, it applies to men as well. And no less to men who had no pretense of legitimate courtship.
You might get over the legal case by showing it's a vexatious lawsuit, for instance by showing that the monetary motivation is not rational because he turned down offers that would have remedied his loss completely.
It seems like the only ones that have benefited (because they got paid to put their time on this), are the lawyers involved, and the people running the courts.
1) Make sure the contract protects you personally if the company cannot pay the note. For example, make it so the note automatically converts to equity instead, or so a certain % of note holders can force the conversion.
2) Make sure there is nothing in there saying that you or your company have to pay the legal fees of the investor.
3) Get legal services / liability insurance for the founders of the company. This will help ease the financial burden in case of legal issues.
Usually, investors that lend you money have a lot more (legal) ways to go after you than equity investors (shareholders). With good actors this is usually not a problem, but when assholes are involved, you never know.
Also, bankruptcy is expensive. There are 2 types of corporate bankruptcy, Chapter 7 and Chapter 11. Ch 7 will cost you about $20-50k in legal fees, depending on the complexity of the case - bear in mind that after the company files for Ch 7, you have to pay for your own legal fees. Ch 11 is about $100k+ - most lawyers will advise against it unless you have pretty deep pockets.
You can also unwind a company outside of court, but it is a bit risky legally and something you definitely not want to do when there's a potential conflict or a bad actor involved.
One possibility that they cancelled their contract not to screw you, but because they felt you were not getting the job done and the future wasn't there for your company. Given that, it would make little sense to extend the note or continue the contract.
As both customer and investor, your vision is not their problem.
Lest you think I'm being to hard on you, I've worked at one startup which went bankrupt in a similar situation (most of the engineering team ended up at working for our biggest customer) and another in which the board fired the CEO, liquidated the bad bits and sold the good bits to one of our customers. In both those cases the founders saw themselves as victims of unscrupulous sharp players, but the reality was that they took other peoples money and were seemingly oblivious to the obligations that entailed.
It is perfectly possible that it could be that way, and I wish it was that way because then it would only be a money issue, which could (in theory) be rationally resolved.
Things that somehow contradict that, is how unwilling to resolve the issue the investor has been. The company was profitable at the time he ended his contract and called the note. At that time he said he didn't care about his note, that he'd just write it off as a loss and he'd get 50% back in taxes. He could also have gotten his money back by taking a payment plan. Additionally we offered up the assets as payment so we could avoid bankruptcy, but he refused. Then he abandoned the assets after acquiring them in bankruptcy.
To me it doesn't make any sense, but I hope you are right, that this is only about his money and that we can somehow reach an agreement that puts a definitive end to this mess.
He might be an evil ass-hole but also he might be thinking that he is the one getting screwed here.
The one thing that holds most of us back is shame. But shame is a good thing in general. It's the glue that keeps societies together, preventing them from spiraling down to the lowest common denominator.
Questionable if this still works nowadays. But, anyway, the trick is to uncork some of that shame is small doses and be a little bit selfish every once in a while.
Secondly, who ever gets fired for asking for a raise? I mean, that is not normal. And if that does happen to you, it's most likely of some other underlying factors, where asking for a raise is just the last drop.
I don't know - man. I've worked at a lot of places and this doesn't seem to be a common thing. It could be I've just worked at a lot of bad places but still. Asking for more isn't enough. It has to be the threat of leaving in order to get them to give more. At which point - the advice now for managers is, if they're threatening to leave unless you pay more then just let them leave.
* If you’re indispensable, the rules may not apply to you
The reason I ask this is because every time I've asked for a raise I've been underpaid relative to the market and known it, and been able to walk into a meeting with a list of numbers recruiters have sent me and credibly state that I'll have to consider other options soon. I would be surprised to find this hadn't worked for someone else, and even more surprised to find they hadn't left.
Not everyone is you/us.
An alternative perspective from my time managing: That reflects the viewpoint of the business, not necessarily the viewpoint of the manager.
Getting an out-of-band raise approved triggers entire internal processes, outside of the control of the immediate manager requesting it.
Triggering one proactively as a manager with no impetus other than "this person deserves it" is likely to get denied or a token amount approved. As you said, the business wants to pay the least amount of money an employee is willing to accept. If the employee has given no indication they have issue with their current pay, the business has no reason to presume there's a need to pay them more.
However, once someone asked for one, I could take that and use it as leverage. If the employee has brought it up, there's evidence of doubt on whether the company is still meeting that minimum threshold. Denying the raise outright increases the risk of attrition, so the business takes it seriously compared to the proactive request from the manager. Then I can use what I know to work the system in the way that results in a far more favorable raise.
Perhaps in the tech industry where there is a lower supply of workers, but not everywhere. Plenty of managers will say no because they know you can be quickly replaced.
It's not charity to pay people what they are worth, it's a good business strategy. Paying them the least they would accept is a sure way to have a high turnover and frustrated employees. Bad strategy. At least in a workers' market (so in IT for example).
Asking for a rise is awkward, many people have problems doing it, so they postpone it. In IT the expected salary growth is pretty fast, especially early in the career, and it's also the time when junior developers are the least used to negotiation with their bosses. So people are routinely underpaid until they talk with their friends and realize switching companies gives them automatic 10-15% rise and some new learning opportunities.
When you have a job applying for a new job is actually pretty stress-free, and it's a good idea to do this from time to time just to see what technologies are hot and what questions people are asking. Then you get offered 15% more than in your current job and a new project that always seems better than the project you're currently working on :)
So companies that don't give rises without being asked to - will have to deal with a high developer turnover and all the associated costs.
If you say "no" when you should, you can say "yes" when it's important.
This is condescending. If you ask, you have to be prepared for the other side saying no. Sometimes, the very act of asking can be construed as offensive and deteriorate relations, resulting in premature termination of either the negotiations or the relationship altogether.
It only makes sense to ask if you have leverage. You have leverage to ask for a raise if you can afford to be unemployed for a while while you look for new work. You have leverage to ask for a reduction in housing rent if the housing market is liquid enough that you are reasonably certain that you can find another place to live that offers you roughly the same utility per dollar that you are already paying.
By definition, people with means are more likely to have leverage than people without means. The question, often enough, is how to get people to realize the leverage they already have, or at least to come up with a strategy to develop leverage where they had none before.
I worked at Goldman Sachs for many years. There was a particular, successful, sales md there. I realized that one of his 'skills' was to ask everyone for something. Not some kind of exchange, or quid-pro-quo, just "can you do X for me", "can you give me Y". If you were gullible enough to do it for him, good for him. You could expect no consideration in return. It's one of those behaviors that worked out well for him, but I found it incredibly unctuous and couldn't bring myself to do it.
In a related way, I remember reading that "hustlers/fraudsters' strategy is to make the situation such that it's impolite for you to say 'no'" Similar idea to the above.
At my first job there was this grizzly old engineer who was known for being pretty surly, but knew the code base almost as if by memory, and the behavior of the code. He was bothered by anything and everything and really just wanted to run out the clock and go home and work in his wood shop.
I was in support and nobody wanted to go to him for help, but man you had to sometimes. I read something about guys like that being really particular about things so I just made a long list of what he was annoyed that people didn't bring him (information wise) and how they brought it to him when people or I did go to him.
Most importantly I'd make a point that he would see that I brought him information (about customer problems) based on his past feedback.
Eventually over the course of months he warmed to me and I could get his help bringing him virtually nothing and he wouldn't complain. Dude was still annoyed for not getting a mountain of information from other techs, but not so much me. People there for 10 years would get a "Have Mark look at it first." talk from him... I had been there for 9 months.
For him it was about getting to know people and trust that they would bother to get him what he needed, once you proved that, he didn't so much care.
In common use, though, "grizzled" is generally used to imply "old" or even "unkempt", and "grizzly" is generally used to imply "bad-tempered" (probably alluding to the behaviour of the "grizzly bear")
..in this case, according to the story, either word would apply!
There is a VAST difference between "surly" and "asshole".
"Surly" is the result of dealing with legions of idiots for 30+ years. Someone who demonstrates "not-an-idiot" is likely to find the "surly" person quite reasonable and trustworthy.
"Asshole" is someone who engages in behaviors to your detriment and simply CANNOT be trusted. You either need to avoid these people or actively destroy them before they get rolling.
Unfortunately, it seems that standard corporate politics is unable to distinguish between the two.
0: Or at least that's the terms I've seen used on HN for those archtypes; obviously Y[vocabulary]MV
1. Add value so there is more pie to go around and get your cut of it.
2. Extract value from what already exists. You get yours, but other people tend to get screwed over.
If you aren't doing the first, you are probably doing the second. This is not really a good long term strategy.
Defining the pie gets really complicated. Sometimes you make one pie bigger and another smaller. Companies like Lyft certainly decreased the taxi pie but then made a new one altogether.
I believe there are fair ways to extract value from what already exists by creating a better version in a competitive market. Ultimately I think the value should be defined at the customer and societal levels. The tangents and levels in between make things messy.
Adding efficiency is a means to add more pie.
Obviously, my comment is a simplification. It kind of goes without saying that simplifications leave out a lot of nuance and gray zone.
Being an asshole is like emitting a poison: at certain doses other people are fine. As it increases they become more transactional* until they shut down or let the relationship die. But this doesn't stop a lot from getting rich.
Assholes do get "handled" however. Often it is used against them. But does this matter to them? Probably not to the extent you would expect. A lot of assholes hide their ways until they pounce.
Being an asshole pays well. Does that make it ok? No. Does it matter to them? Likely not: they're assholes.
The real lesson is to learn not to include assholes in your inner circle. And make it hard for them to join or get too close. There are benefits to not being an asshole.
All that said, there are benefits to having an asshole. Shit needs to go through somewhere. And particular people are well suited to it. Let them. Some deals go better when done between assholes.
* Or they're like a hot oven. We will tolerate the heat because we like cookies. But won't leave our hands in there too long or unprotected. We will turn the oven off completely when we don't need cookies. Transaction complete, cut ties. We might come up with ways to reduce exposure down to minimal levels. We'll wear gloves. Less time spent. Or we'll find a better oven with a better door and insulated handles.
There is a difference, for example, between being vindictive towards others, and simply pushing people out of their comfort zone.
The term "asshole" is so vague that it borders on useless.
It is a random person ranting and completely subjective.
The article doesn't define it that way.
It's very clear what this article is getting at.
- beeing unfriendly when someone has a bad day
- going out of your way to make someones life harder
- unemphatically beeing to hard to someone in the wrong moment
- participiting in badmouthing or mobbing
- pushing work and tasks that you should do onto others without explicitly talking about it
- beeing snarky to people who know less than you
Etc.
This is all subjective and I'm surprised this article is even on here, it's just someone ranting.
Let's say you sell some Saas tool. You're an asshole if you try to sell to anyone even if you think it won't help them. You're not an asshole if you truly believe your service will benefit your customers. You're an idiot if you're selling to someone and you can't tell the difference.
I agree that my definition was certainly lacking but I hope this clarifies my intent to separate true assholery with simply being unpleasant to be around.
That’s way too general. If I’m a start up raising money from a VC and I counter with an offer of a lower percentage of equity for an investment, I’m doing something that benefits me at the expense of others.
I would say you’d need to layer on top being deceitful or underhanded in your actions.
The goal is that everyone enters into an arrangement with full knowledge of the terms.
"Recover any and all actual, incidental and consequential damages to XYZ, including but not limited to actual or estimated loss of profits and sales and costs to cover, attorney’s fees and costs.."
I wrote back: "Nice try but yeah, no. ;-) "
(My lawyer fixed all these overreaches and they were a great client.)
As an aside my lawyer told me that when you a drafting a contract with someone you want to work with, its best to be fair. If you don't, you're starting the relationship where the counter-party doesn't trust you. After all, you tried to screw them the very first chance you had.
If I get 9 pages of "our standard contract" and I read it through, ask if I can make changes and if they say yes, I give it to my lawyer.
For that contract I actually wrote back this:
Who signs these “standard contracts”?
This is the whole email:
"Hi Guys,
Who signs these “standard contracts”?
4.2. In the event the Provider is in breach of any of the representations or warranties set forth in Section 4.1 above, in addition to any other remedies IPG may have under this Agreement, IPG, at its sole option and without incurring any liability, may: (d) Recover any and all actual, incidental and consequential damages to IPG, including but not limited to actual or estimated loss of profits and sales and costs to cover, attorney’s fees and costs;
Nice try but yeah, no. ;-)
If I can strike out the unreasonable parts we can probably come to some agreement.
-Chris"
Also, the huge difference between emotional/perceptive aggression, and actual aggression.
There are loud, crude people who like to push for a fair deal, or who are not aggressive terms.
There are 'nice', cunning manipulative people who seek excessive terms.
There are actually truly nice people, who push for assertive terms, not realising how far they are going.
And of course, there's mostly tons of misinterpretations: people who have totally different needs, perspective, expectations with respect to how to go about a situation. A founder seeing aggression might actually be an investor taking a perfectly normative demand.
But yes, I've seen utter stupidity in deal making.
Relationships do matter, and you need a working agreement with whoever you're working with, investors included.
Make “rising tide lifts all boats” deals. Here, you’re entering in a deal to create additional value to the world.
Don’t make deals with a zero-sum outlook. Here, you’re entering into a deal for, at best, a transfer of existing value within the world.
It is self-evidently morally better, of course. And it may be financially better too. But the article just flatly claims it in a number of single-sentence paragraphs without communicating any real data.
This sentence alone contradicts the title...
If you're going for maximizing ev, I believe my thoughts hold true.
If you respond to these, or offers to re-fi your house, or help someone move their royal fortune out of Nigeria, you're indeed going to be dealing with assholes.
If you want to sell your business, take charge and run a competitive bidding process. But ignore unsolicited offers.
Now I think about this situation as a variation of the prisoners dilemma. If both parties play nice, each one gets a smaller payoff. If one is an asshole and the other is nice, the asshole gets a bigger payoff (by shafting the nice party). This article proposes that being nice is beneficial for all parties in the long term. That holds true also in the prisoners dilemma, if the game repeats over time.
Now, why do people still act that way? One option, as this article presumes, is that people are simply not aware that is the best option in the long term.
The second, most insidious option, is that they are aware, and do it in purpose. Maybe the world is still big enough that you can play a first game with different people until your fame catches up. Maybe the payoff for being an asshole is so high that a single win is enough to retire.
Nature does not care about killing us. The universe will feel no remorse if an asteroid kills us all or we do it ourselves with nukes. Corona doesn't feel shame.
We're prisoners in so many ways. When are we going to start cooperating to try to escape our death sentence? Or are we content to fight each other over scraps while we await our fate?
Understanding that cooperation provides higher benefit to players compared to competition requires prior education among the players. It is literally part of any Introduction to Economics course.
The problem is a) under-education b) irrational players.
So this is solid advice, but unfortunately the role models are exactly those people that didn't follow this sort of advice. Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Google and Facebook all would not have been as large and would not generate as much money for their founders if the founders had been nice guys. Fortunately we also have Woz and a couple of others like him to balance things out a bit.
It's better than lobbying because you don't need to convince people to do things your way if they like you.
I've noticed such activity in places as unexpected as imgur, reddit or HN. Posts boosted out of nowhere, waves of comments for a specific trend in their favor, accounts that are very quick to react to critics, etc.
It feels off, but on the other hand it's impossible to prove. You could always argue it's genuine and it would be impossible to be sure.
It's amazing how you can use the same data to argue the opposite point, just on how you frame it.
Warren Buffet' father was a congressman
Larry Page's father was a professor of computer science at University
Sergey Brin's father was professor of mathematics at University and his mother worked at NASA
these are the first three I looked up and they don't look like low or middle class
There are 535 Congressmen in USA, 99.99999999% of them is well... 535.
If I find the son of a Congressman that made billions your model will prove wrong
Warren Buffet is one.
How is it not upper class?
But, I think middle class is more than just raw finance. Educational background of the parents is very important too. If you grow up with two professors - don't you think you'll do better than two high school dropouts? (On average)
Is there really such a thing as self-made? I honestly don't believe so. Otherwise, I think more people would do it.
Not saying that those situations are perfectly comparable at all, just trying to make a point that "if it was so good and easy, why isn't everyone successfully doing it" isn't really a solid argument for this.
Also, if it were true that people could be "self-made", we'd see a more diverse selection of "self-made" people. Instead, we see races and genders that aren't doing anywhere near as well as other races and genders.
If you think in terms of financial upbringing, we got a lot of diversity going. US has an insane turnover in terms of wealth, with a really high number of first gen millionaires and billionaires. Also note the fact that 70% of families losing wealth just a generation or two down the road[0]. Which is imo a very good thing, as it brings more evidence and support for the "self-made" theory.
In terms of social upbringing, just look at the numbers of top-tier CEOs and founders who are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves[1].
0. https://money.com/rich-families-lose-wealth/
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...
The percentage of people with significant inherited wealth who becomes billionaires far exceeds the percentage of people with significant inherited wealth in the general population.
Thus, inheriting wealth has an enormous impact on the likelihood of becoming a billionaire in America.
I guarantee if a the son of a middle class innkeeper with an absentee father from Greenbow, Alabama became a billionaire people would say he had an advantage because he got to experience a diverse group of people as a kid and had a loving mother who supported him. An orphan living on the streets in an impoverished town in Italy and we'd say not everyone has the opportunity to make their own way when they're only 9 years old.
Shrug.
Jeff Bezos
Bill Gates
Warren Buffett
Mark Zuckerberg
Larry Ellison
Larry Page
Sergey Brin
Michael Bloomberg
Steve Ballmer
Jim Walton
I'll start: Here's my list of the "self-made":
Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg (although I don't know how he made partner at Bloomberg at 30). Maybe Steve Ballmer. Page and Brin are special cases; they're the children of university professors.
However, I have to qualify this by saying that I didn't ever work in Ads. And this is a common day-to-day googler's view who didn't know anything that went on in the executive land (e.x. Andy Rubin)
Or did they become assholes along the way/once they got there?
America seems to have an absolutist mindset. Being a billionaire != success/happiness in life. There's a lot of grey between the black and white.
https://www.gq.com/story/young-bill-gates-was-an-angry-offic...
They cultivated strategic partnerships with the right people at the right time, and once they got enough of what they wanted, sometimes they behaved like assholes.
They probably behaved like assholes with some employees but not their key employees.
Except Woz ended up a low digit millionaire, and Jobs a multi-billionaire. Hard work simply doesn't pay off the way being a sociopath does in our society.
> So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle
Not convinced of this either. You can't get away with being the type of assholes the billionaires are, but you still have to be a bit of an asshole to move up in the middle.
On the other hand, you're much more likely to get to the upper-middle than the top, so it's reasonable to optimize for that more-readily-achievable goal.
Possibly. How can we know for sure? Isn't this survivorship bias? Wouldn't more feasible companies, with more friendly leaders, have become leaders then? Or how about multiple companies ie. healthy competition?
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/Study-compares-peac...
After agreeing the purchase of the site for the house I'm now sitting in, the sellers changed their asking price, tried to pull out of the sale after we got planning permission, accused us of swindling them, and the night before we fenced the property moved the boundary markers.
When it was all done and dusted one of our neighbours said "it's great to see someone getting the better of $FAMILY_X". Seems like we weren't entitled to access to their reputations until we'd started to build the house, and became true locals
https://www.amazon.com/Getting-More-Negotiate-Succeed-Work/d...
Effectively each group gets to focus on efforts & shape the outcome in pursuit of mutual growth, with a non-lopsided good-faith buffer to start with, compared to predatory terms.
The reduction in risk and increase in functional leverage is phenomenal.
Alternatively, with a ruthless arrangement, there will be opportunity-sucking or destructive imbalances for operations across a financial spectrum, whether prosperous or underperforming at the time. Greedy ars'les thrive making surplus look & act like shortage.
Some people also seem to learn how to capitalize on their poor reputations. If you're well known in an industry, even for something bad, you can often get people to talk to you.
This can also be said for the hiring of talent. But these hiring people aren't only aholes, plenty of them are simply plain ol' dumbasses.
Of course you're not getting the best people, you're sending up red flags like fireworks on 4th of July.
More than that. In general, the market rewards being asshole and borderline fraudster. Reputation is a thing within smaller groups, but what matters is primarily reputation related to your behavior towards your peers in that group. And if your peer group is composed of assholes, then being an asshole is a positive trait as long as you're not an asshole towards members of that group.
Another thing: when you're a no-name upstart, reputation matters little because nobody knows you. When you're a large, successful business, any bad reputation can be compensated by proportionate spending on PR and advertising.
Yet another thing: in B2C, consumers often don't have a meaningful choice. An individual is juggling a lot of different priorities in their lives, not least of which is "saving money" and "buying stuff one likes". So e.g. Coca-Cola does a pretty lot of evil stuff, but people have strong taste preferences in the product category Coca-Cola sells, so nobody really boycotts them. Or, pretty much every major brand of smartphones is doing evil things, and every major telco provider is filled with assholes - yet as a citizen of the western world, I really do need to have a smartphone. So I have to choose someone. Or, a grocery store next to the place I used to live would wash stale meat with detergent and sell as fresh. This lands straight into asshole category, but I still went there, because a) it was the closest store, and b) I have no guarantee other stores don't do the same (and plenty of reasons to suspect they do).
And yet another thing: taking VC investments; when investors come knocking for their returns, plenty of startups are forced to become assholes.
--
TL;DR: The market rewards assholes. If you're not an asshole, your competitors will force you to either become one, or get marginalized. There's an excellent essay that goes into details about the mechanics of that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
One day, I hope for a society where money is a real measure of productivity and all the things the OP said will be 100% valid. This is not that day.
Unfortunately, our economy is now based on high short-term gains, there's plenty of axxholes everywhere.
But it's hard to be successful if you don't do those things.
> So many people are straight assholes in business. Especially the more you climb the ladder. As my bootstrapped business reached $3M ARR, a wave of no-name investors approached us. Some of the term sheets more than insulted me. They sought to take control of the company without any payout for the co-founders or employees. They just wanted to capitalize a company they'd now own.
> I don't understand why.
(Warning: Probably unpopular opinion for capitalistic mind sets following)
Well, big surprise, because they got corrupted (ethically) by their money and greed, or that is the way they got a hold of it in the first place. They got some, so they want more. Money buys almost anything in capitalistic society after all. They see a chance to take advantage of a fellow human being, a chance to profit! They do not care about the human in your business. They care about ways they could profit from it. You are only a means of increasing their capital. The higher the amount of money investors have, the more likely, that they got it through ethically questionable means, because that is, where the big money is made.
There might be ethical investors out there too. Haven't knowingly met any such yet, might have unknowingly met some. It is probably also quite difficult to keep a clean sheet through all the complexity of today's financial world.
(perspective change from having a company which others want to invest in, to investments being done by people)
There is a difference between working for a wage and using money to "magically" create more money, fueling turbo capitalism. In many cases that difference is an ethical one: What investments does one make? Can one be sure, that those investments are not actually investments, which flow directly or indirectly into production of weapons, climate destroying big companies, pesticide producing giants, who are responsible for decimating bee populations and starvation in third world countries? Anyone "investing" should really think hard about it and be on the lookout for superficially nice investments, which are actually indirectly quite unethical.
Now I will admit, that there are probably still many ways to make ethical investments. Of course there are. It's just that those are not yielding the highest returns. You could invest in social projects, in green energy/technology, in research for many good things. You can even donate to a good cause (like protection of rain forest) and thereby make an investment into all our future.
Most people, who "invest" in something however, are almost completely after the returns those things yield and do not give a damn about the ethical aspect of that investment. They do not give a thought about indirectly investing in some huge company, which takes part in producing weapons or building the next big coal mine (thinking of a recent example).
Lets take a look at for example DAX (German stock index). Anyone investing in any "financial product" that invests into the top n DAX companies. There we have BASF and Bayer, responsible for producing, selling and lobbying for pesticide usage and killing natural diversity and species, starvation of people in India and forcing farmers to use genetically modified seeds, in the name of profit. We have BMW and Daimler, where at least to my knowledge Daimler is part of the diesel scandal, making people believe their cars were cleaner than they really are, indirectly guilty of dealing huge damage to our environment and health. We have Deutsche Bank and Telekom there as well. Telekom just sucks for being a monopoly (at least was) and keeping technology way behind in Germany. Deutsche bank does not have a good name, when we talk about ethics, although I do not personally know exactly what they did. Probably investments in weapons and stuff like that. And wasn't Adidas connected to child labour in third world countries?
So basically anyone investing in DAX as such invests in these at least partly evil players, knowingly or unknowingly. But people are being scared by people working in banks and other places, who tell them that, if they do not invest into something with more risk, they will not be able to take advantage of those precious percentages at the stock market and then those scared people stop thinking and become investors. Notice also how usually the people, who are consulting you at banks and insurances try to steer you into the direction of stock market backed investments. Usually they will make other options simply look worth, simply based on percentages. That is often, because when you invest into such products of theirs, their company gets more flexibility of investment itself and can do more unethical investments, yielding higher returns for them.
In my opinion anyone investing into anything has a responsibility. That responsibility is not to increase their own riches, but to look out (not only superficially) for any ethically questionable consequences of their investment and even the responsibility to try to make the world a better place with their investment.
https://forensicnews.net/2020/01/03/trump-deutsche-bank-loan...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/how-deutsche-bank-helped-fi...
Until you have a lot of money, and then you become an asshole.
As for Trump, he probably should've put his daddy's money in the S&P.
Putin is worth 200 billions...
It doesn't mean being an asshole it's the best strategy to become rich, it isn't enough to become one and generally I think being good decent human beings is much better for society and for themselves, but the numbers shows that very rich people are usually not among the best people in this world.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, Jack Dorsey, all of AirBNB and Uber's executive staff, Mark Benioff, Larry Ellison and Donald Trump would all beg to differ.